Panel Statement
Panel: The Big Bang of Electronic Art: Merging Abstraction and Representation in the Age of Digital Imaging
In the society of the spectacle, the art of the mass media changes the modern relationship between art and its audience. The art resides in the shaping of this unseen, diffuse spectatorship where the medium is the masses. In mass media, context transmutes image from scopic to semiotic. Abstraction and Representation are fungible within this context. This paper brings attention to the work of artists whose process employs the appropriation, compression, and decontextualization of mass media imagery. Resulting works reveal the flattening of the human soul caused by mass media. The onslaught of media-images sublimates the image to the message, and renders it meaningless. These artists return the image back to a state of purity: open, and alive. As in JMW Turner’s famous painting Snow Storm: Steam Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth, 1844 (coll: Tate Modern) where the only sign of Modernity is blurred and thus reveals the luminous brilliance of Nature, contemporary artists resist cultural amnesia and objectification through deliberate attempts to fight the inversion of the human spirit. This process is one of utopian remediation towards memory instead of cultural amnesia and the objectification of the human to presence within the flesh. The space provided by these contemporary artworks redeem the soul and offer a transcendent experience of the sublime. All images end at the flesh.
- Anat Pollack is a convergent media artist. She is interested in interactivity through real-time digital processing in the installation setting. Combining old technologies with new, she is interested in engaging memory/nostalgia with the present. Memory in particular is a constant theme in her research as she works to simulate the human experience using digital and mechanical systems. She is specifically interested in the way that our memory functions, and the difference between human and machine information processing. In the past year,she has had a number of exhibitions including a solo show at the University of Colorado in Colorado Springs, and participated in the juried shows: the VII Salon de Arte Digital at the Centro Pablo de la Torriente Brau in Havana Cuba, and at the Catherine J. Smith Gallery in Boone NC, and presented her work at RSVP Words, Images and the Framing of Social Reality Conference at the New School in Manhattan, NY, US.
Full text (PDF) p. 1955-1957 [Different title!]